From Nazi archaeology to modern Egyptian nationalism, the search for ancestral purity distorts the very idea of civilization—founded not on isolation, but on exchange.
The concept of “zeitgeist,” literally “spirit of the time” in German, emerged from idealism; Herder and Hegel argued that the intellectual climate of an era shapes the way people of an era see things and, ultimately, the way they define truth and pursue scientific research.
A case in point is the biased science around the purity and relative isolation of entire peoples in areas of the world shaped by cultural and genetic interchange, which shaped pseudo-scientific beliefs around eugenics or even led to made-up assumptions issued from biased archeological research (a case in point is the pre-established relation that Nazi Germany tried to demonstrate between the idea of Aryan supremacy and archeological excavations in Northern Europe by an SS-sponsored research institute).
We don’t live in the zeitgeist of Nazi Germany, though ours is a time of idealism and nationalism resurgence, which is also influencing public opinion, scientific research, and policy. Consider, for example, the findings after the successful sequencing of an Egyptian person who lived 4,500 years ago during the Old Kingdom.
The current Egyptian regime, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (a former general and defense minister who came to power after a military coup in 2013), has promoted a narrative of national greatness rooted in a glorified version of ancient Egypt, presented as the unbroken cultural and genetic legacy of modern Egyptians.
Ancient Egypt and the revival of the purity narrative
The genetic findings published by Nature suggest otherwise. If we were to consider the individual whose remains were successfully sequenced as representative of the Egyptian population at the time, it would be easy to debunk narratives that represent powerful cultures from the past as self-contained silos, issued from areas carefully demarcated and inhabited by the linear ancestry of the current population. Only the reality is more complex.
If most of the adult male excavated at Nuwayrat (Nuerat), who lived around 2855–2570 BCE (somewhere between 4,880 to 4,595 years ago, according to radiocarbon) “is best represented by North African neolithic ancestry” (somehow related to, say, descendants of Berbers), at least 20% of the genome can be traced to the eastern Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and surrounding regions:
“This genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Although more genomes are needed to understand the genomic diversity of early Egyptians fully, our results indicate that contacts between Egypt and the eastern Fertile Crescent were not limited to objects and imagery (such as domesticated animals and plants, as well as writing systems but also encompassed human migration.”
So the people who lived in the era that starts with the construction with the first pharaonic temples and pyramids, millennia before cultural Greeks settled in Egypt and influenced culture, language, and governing through the Ptolemaic period (the Ptolemaic royalty, such as Cleopatra, were mainly of Greek origin), already showed genetic markers of dynamic, cosmopolitan cultures interchanging not only goods across the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia in Eastern Asia, but also contributing to ancient admixture in the region.
The contradiction of exclusive nationalism
The more nationalism tries to dig into history to look for the hoped-for purity that fostered a glorious past, the more it faces reality: there was no such thing as a totally local, innocent Golden Age of any civilization, for the scale demanded by civilizations always requires events such as an interchange of goods, cultural artifacts, and also genes.
Civilizations thrive on exchange. However, history shows different models and degrees in which civilizations used ethnic or cultural hegemony to impose upon others. That said, “civilization” itself (any complex society with a state, social stratification, urbanization, and strong symbolic systems, including a language it tries to impose) depends on agricultural diffusion, trade routes, linguistic and religious syncretism, migration, and conquest, etc. In such processes, there’s also a degree of genetic influence.
To deny this reality would imply that many radical nationalisms advocating for the superiority of the “people” to whom they belong, would face a foundational contradiction: through voluntary and cultural diffusion since the Neolithic, Europe benefited from methods of plant and animal domestication, as well as ideas and scientific discoveries from places like the Fertile Crescent, China, Ethiopia, the Indus Valley, the Arab world and later the Americas. Wouldn’t advocating for civilizational isolation have condemned Western and Northern Europe to reject the technological borrowings that later forged its superiority in areas such as scientific development?
Such contradictions seem to bother little to current advocates of cultural and civilizational purity and superiority. Why?
The slow decline of civilizational hegemony
When you feel you’re on top, when do you know that the civilization that made you possible is in decay? You just don’t know, because the road to stagnation and irrelevance can be as long as those barely inclined downslopes that go on for miles, creating the perception of normalcy and self-preservation.
Look at a world map, study the regularity of borders across most of the world, and notice how people live, worship, or which language they speak, to realize that Europe, first, and the United States during the last century, have shaped the way most people perceive our life in the world.
Given the current political and economic trends, the half-millennia chapter in which Eurocentrism dominated as one assumed idea of how the world is and who dominates its main trends, with several consecutive Western civilizations on top, may be coming to an end as consequential as the so-called European Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman Empire.
By population and economic importance, extra-European civilizations like China and India outpaced “the West” since the cultural acceleration and urbanization of the first semi-centralized agrarian societies after the Neolithic; plant and animal domestication, as well as significant agricultural and civil engineering works such as irrigation canals, preceded written culture in most regions, making the archeological work about the rise of the early civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, Central Asia, India, and China a permanent task of evidence testing and reverse engineering, now assisted by AI.
Beyond Eurocentrism
That’s why it’s been refreshing to finally welcome studies about early civilizations and regional interchanges that attempt to move beyond Eurocentrism, embracing complexity and systems thinking to draw more informed conclusions about the world.
Amid many examples, people have been exposed to perspectives that explain the importance of pathogens, war technology, and the concept of being in a mission of Christian evangelization to explain European domination and colonialism (see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel), but also relativize the European weight in the world’s economy and affairs during the onset of Renaissance: Western Europe remained a backwater territory for millennia, and in the apex of Roman domination, Eastern provinces, with their epicenter in Egypt, the Empire’s breadbasket but also a knowledge and population powerhouse, dwarfed western provinces and regions like the ones in Britannia and even Hispania or Gallia.
Outside the Western idea of the “Old World” (with its epicenter around the Mediterranean—Mare Nostrum, our sea, to the Romans—in Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa), many civilizations outweighed this region by population and economic output: the kingdoms of China and India are the proven cases, albeit not the only ones.
Before being subjugated by Rome, Ancient Egypt had benefited from political centralization, civil engineering works, and the Nile’s agricultural abundance, which enabled it to control international trade routes and become the richest region around the Mediterranean, contrasting with the sparsely populated tribal strongholds in Western European lands.
Richer Pasts, forgotten centers
Right before the beginning of the Iron Age and the collapse of many old kingdoms around the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean Levant, Mesopotamia (Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria), or the Indus Valley Civilization, or Persia, were, each on their own, richer and more potent than the whole of Western and Northern Europe.
Up until recently, scholars had studied the sophisticated cultures of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean region (including Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire, Egypt’s New Kingdom, and their area of influence) as rather isolated civilizations; a small but important book by Eric C. Cline (1177 BC: When Civilization Collapsed) explains the interconnection of such cultures in a cosmopolitan world of intense interchange.
Many mysteries remain about the late Bronze Age collapse in the region, which led to the partial replacement of many of these cultures. Studies associate this replacement with the arrival of the so-called “Sea Peoples” (most likely European attackers settling in the region after an invasion). I reviewed this book in October 2023.
After the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages, many multicultural empires relying on conquest, relative tolerance, and commercial interchanges (the Islamic Caliphate, the Mongol Empire) controlled large chunks of Eurasia and North Africa.
Books by authors like British historians Felipe Fernández-Armesto (The World: A History) and Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World) are well-researched, humbling works for those eager to learn about the world’s commerce and powers across Eurasia and Africa before and after the rise of the (smaller, less populated, poorer if compared to other regions of the world) European powers.
To gain a richer perspective on the Western Hemisphere before and after the arrival of Europeans, Charles C. Mann’s efforts to present a more objective picture of the Americas “before” (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus) and “after” (1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created) Columbus’s arrival are perhaps the most interesting from a reader’s perspective.
I’ve read (and enjoyed) the books I mention in this article and would recommend them to anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the reality we live in. As it should be, there’s no simplistic, single conclusion one could draw from reading these books other than the fairly substantial incidence of environmental factors, but also chance and a dose of randomness, in how the world turned out to be.
I do remember one common theme, however: self-isolated societies didn’t make a big imprint in the world, whereas very connected peoples, open to travel and interchanges (voluntarily or, in most cases before modern times, forcibly) set the conditions for the people we are today and the world we have created.
Debugging the narrative
We tend to consider our foundational myths as religious and epic-literary beliefs that are somehow disassociated from history and modern scientific thought. Yet, many modern countries use archaeology and history as tools to justify expansionism, oppression, and different levels of covert discrimination against entire cultures (that claim ownership of ancient places and foundational myths of their own).
In other words, many of the most complex and challenging conflicts in the world today are based on nationalist constructions influenced by nineteenth-century idealism (the idea of purity culture, race, etc., a relatively recent development can be traced to the rise of German idealism in the late eighteenth century, influenced by Platonic ideals). When modern States, issued from the Enlightenment, sanctioned these ideas as “scientific,” they also became a tool to be exploited with the patina of ancestry and legitimacy.
If meliorism (the belief that the world can be made better by human effort and history is linear, guaranteeing that the future will be somehow better and more prosperous than the past, and the arc of the moral universe “is long, but it bends towards justice”) were a software, if would certainly need to be carefully, conscientiously debugged, for citizens of complex societies today can be as easily thrown against each other by reminding them of their tribal allegiances as they were during the Old Kingdom of Egypt, when the adult man of Nuwayrat was going about his life.
Perhaps, this man cultivated some grain and herded some animals, buying some other things in the market and paying taxes for his activity.
Reminding people of their differences instead of their shared hopes
Ethnically and culturally homogeneous countries confront moments of crisis in a very different way than multiethnic and culturally complex modern societies (such as the United States or Brazil) do. As deep inequality and tensions such as the urban vs. rural divide reach new levels despite the buoyant prosperity of a part of the American society, a gag by George Carlin always comes to my mind, especially if you’re passing a bill that punishes the least prosperous part of society while managing to reward those already doing great: when things go awry, make sure you remember the middle class and people at the bottom of the things that keep them apart, so they keep fighting among themselves instead of turning against what perpetuates this outcome.
The man from Nuwayrat didn’t know he’d become a data point in a global conversation about purity, ancestry, and belonging. He likely woke up to the sounds of grain being milled, animals being herded, and traders preparing for market. His world, like ours, was defined not by static borders or bloodlines, but by exchange—of goods, genes, and ideas. And just as the spirit of his time shaped the temples, tools, and tombs we study today, so too does our zeitgeist mold the stories we tell about the past.
If we want a better future, we must learn to read those stories not as myths of isolation, but as records of entanglement and interdependence.